Are ” human centered” methods really the best way to get to know your customers?

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Influenced by the wave of businesses going digital, the necessity to be innovative and the return to start-up wisdom, many consulting methodologies that help businesses better take the customer’s point of view into consideration when designing their products and services have been developed in recent years. The user centric methodologies (also referred to as ” human centered ») which help create, monetize or improve customer experience, include:  UX and Interaction Design (IxD) (1980 -1990), Design Thinking (1990s), Scrum and Agile, the lean strategy process (2000s), the business model generation (Years 2010), nudge… And, more recently, GV’s (formerly, Google Ventures) Design Sprint, a hybrid of other methods, focused on speed. Stemming for the most part from an IT development culture, these methodologies with rather eccentric names, serve the interests of a variety of functions, often in cross-functional teams and at various times in the business cycle – to conceive a new service, devise a new business model, improve a digital interface, facilitate a pathway…

Unlike the “process centric” methodologies (such as Kanban or Six Sigma) or “technology centric” ones (such as Triz or C-K), these later ones are “user centric” and all start with a phase, some deeper than others, of understanding customer needs and behavior. To do this, each methodology has developed techniques to collect, organize and interpret customer data necessary for the methodology to run smoothly, starting with, for example, digital online browsing data, in-situ interviews or even journey observation. Agile study techniques are often referred to as “guerrilla” techniques compared to thos